Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. Some key vocabulary words that are important to Phonemic Awareness are:

Phoneme: the smallest unit of spoken language that makes a difference for knowing the meaning of words.
Grapheme: the smallest unite of written language that represents the spelling of phonemes.
Phoneme identification: when children recognize the same sounds in different words
Phoneme isolation: when children recognize individual sounds in a word: 
Phoneme substitution: when children substitute one phoneme for another to make a new word
Phoneme categorization: when children recognize the word in a set of three or four words that has the “odd” sound
Phoneme deletion: when children recognize the word that remains when a phoneme is removed from another word
Phoneme addition: when children make a new word by adding a phoneme to an existing word

In order to assess if a student has strong phonemic awareness skills, they must be able to correctly isolate, substitute, categorize, identify, segment, blend, delete and add phonemes. However, the two most important parts of phonemic awareness are blending and segmenting. Phoneme blending is when children listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes and then combine the phonemes to form a word. Phoneme segmenting is when children break a word into its separate sounds, saying each sound as they tap out or count it. Some activites for a student to do are elkonin boxes. Elkonin boxes allow students to separate words into individual sounds and blend them together. Elkonin boxes support children's spelling, reading and writing development.